The history of scoliosis / by Robert W. Lovett.

  • Robert W. Lovett
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The history of scoliosis / by Robert W. Lovett. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    and then dropped to the ground, striking on one end, thus tend- ing to straighten the spine, or such patients were put into an apparatus to make extension and pressure on the prominence. He adds as a further refinement of his treatment, “It is also safe for a person to sit upon the hump while extension is being made, and raising himself to let himself fall down again upon the patient.” He also suggests putting one foot on the hump or using a long wooden lever, but one finds no mention of any at- tempt at retention, and the reason for this is that all the treatment was based on the supposition that the affection was due to a dislocation, which demanded reduction only. For about two thousand years after Hippocrates scoliosis attracted little attention and no advance was made, Paul of Aegina, 650 A. D., suggested bandaging to wooden strips in cases of curvature of all varieties, and Albukasis 500 years later announced that “no one could cure curvature to the side.” And so one comes down through the centuries with no new light to the time of Ambroise Pare, born in 1510, and we find him where we left Hippocrates 2000 years before. I quote from his writings: “A dislocated vertebra standing forth and making a bunch is termed in Greek kyphosis, but when it is depressed it is called lordosis, but when the same is luxated to the right or left side it maketh a scoliosis, which, wresting the spine, draws it into the similitude of the letter S . . . . Fluid and soft bodies, such as children, are very subject to gener- ate this internal cause of defluxion. Thus nurses, while they too straitly lace the breasts and sides of girls so to make them slender, cause the breast bone to cast itself in forward or back or else the one shoulder to be bigger or fuller, the other more spare or lean. The same error is committed if they lay children frequently and long upon their sides, then upon their backs, or if in taking them up when they walk they take them only by the feet or legs and never put their other hand in their backs, never so much as thinking that children grow most toward their heads.” Then follows a fair account of the deformity, and the reduction of the dislocation is on the same lines as advocated by Hippocrates, by extension and pressure by the